Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, appears in the book as a labor organizer who helped turn workplace protest into a broad coalition for political change in Brazil. His defining act came at the Scânia truck factory in São Bernardo on May 12, 1978: when company representatives asked him to persuade striking workers to return to their jobs, he refused. The strike became a starting point for a national wave of labor action and, in time, for the formation of the Workers’ Party and the return of democracy.## Identity and the Scânia StrikeLula was thirty-three years old in 1978 and president of the São Bernardo Metalworkers. The book introduces him amid a specific grievance: Brazil’s military government had fixed national inflation figures, understating the rise in the cost of living, while strikes had been prohibited since 1964, when the military overthrew the democratic government of President João Goulart. At the Scânia truck factory in São Bernardo, workers put down their tools as the 7:00 a.m. shift began. At 8:00, union organizer Gilson Menezes called the union; by noon, Lula had arrived. The company asked him to persuade the employees to resume work. He declined, aligning himself with the workers’ refusal and the dispute that had brought them out.## From Wage Dispute to Political CoalitionThe Scânia stoppage was the first in a wave of strikes across Brazil. Wages were the immediate issue, but the episode also exposed the political force that could be built through organized labor. Lula later described the connection directly: “I think we can’t separate economic and political factors.… The … struggle was over wages, but in struggling for wages, the working class won a political victory.” The strike therefore mattered in the book’s account not simply as an industrial dispute, but as an instance of workers gaining collective political agency under military rule.Lula’s role took shape within a movement broader than the unions. In 1973, the intellectual Fernando Henrique Cardoso argued that Brazil’s return to democracy would be made by diverse groups opposing the military coming together: professional associations, trade unions, churches, student organizations, study groups, debating circles, and social movements. The Scânia strike helped signal the possibility of such an alliance. Lula and other union leaders sought to connect workplace organization to a political platform, while civic groups and opposition figures supplied a wider base.## Building the Workers’ PartyBy late 1978, Lula was discussing the creation of a new political party. He did not envision it as a vehicle solely for unionists: he insisted it should represent wage earners and poor people more generally. That ambition gave organizational form to the emerging coalition between union leaders and social movements. At a meeting in São Paulo on August 18, 1979, former opposition politicians, union leaders, students, intellectuals, and representatives of one hundred social movements gathered to discuss the party’s formation. The Workers’ Party was launched in October 1979 at the São Judas Tadeo restaurant in São Bernardo, bringing these different constituencies together.The party then used the gradual political opening organized by the military, reluctantly, to enter electoral politics. It first ran candidates in local elections in 1982 and won two mayoral races. During the 1980s, as democracy was gradually re-created, the party gained control of more local governments. By 1988 it governed thirty-six municipalities, including São Paulo and Porto Alegre. Its growth connected Lula’s original base in organized labor to a wider political organization with experience in local administration.## Electoral Setbacks and Political AscentLula became the Workers’ Party’s presidential candidate in the first free presidential election since the military coup. In 1989 he received 16 percent of the vote in the first round; in the runoff against Fernando Collor, he won 44 percent but was defeated. He also lost to Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the presidential elections of 1994 and 1998. These losses did not end his political trajectory. The party’s growing local presence and its work with social movements continued to build the organizational reach behind its national ambitions.In 2002, Lula was elected president of Brazil. The book presents that victory as the national culmination of a process that had begun with labor mobilization and broadened into civic and political organization. It also reports that the Workers’ Party remained in power thereafter. Lula’s rise is thus tied not only to successive candidacies, but to the construction of a coalition and party capable of contesting elections and governing at multiple levels.## Local Participation and Broader ChangeAs the Workers’ Party took over more local governments, especially during the 1990s, it developed a close relationship with social movements. In Porto Alegre, its first administration after 1988 introduced participatory budgeting, a process that brought ordinary citizens into decisions about the city’s spending priorities. The book describes this method as a model for local accountability and responsiveness, associated with improvements in public services and quality of life. In this account, local participation was not separate from Lula’s national ascent: effective municipal government helped encourage political mobilization and supported the party’s wider electoral success.The book also connects the coalition that Lula helped assemble to changes in social and economic conditions. Since 1990, Brazil’s growth had been rapid; the share of the population living in poverty fell from 45 percent to 30 percent in 2006. Inequality, which had risen rapidly under military rule, fell sharply, particularly after the Workers’ Party took power. Education expanded as well: average years of schooling rose from six in 1995 to eight in 2006. Brazil also became one of the BRIC nations and, in the book’s formulation, the first Latin American country to carry weight in international diplomatic circles. These developments are presented as consequences of a broader transformation, not as effects attributable to Lula alone.## Historical SignificanceThe book contrasts Brazil’s path with political change imposed from above. Unlike England’s seventeenth-century transformation or France’s revolution at the turn of the eighteenth century, Brazil had no single radical revolution that changed its institutions at once. Its transition instead grew from grassroots empowerment that began in factories such as Scânia, spread through social movements and a broad political coalition, and contributed to the transition from military rule to democracy. Lula’s importance in this account lies in helping connect those stages: he refused to call workers back to their jobs, argued that economic demands carried political consequences, and promoted a party that extended beyond organized labor.The comparison with Venezuela clarifies the book’s distinction between electoral democracy and pluralism. Venezuela also transitioned to democracy after 1958, but, without grassroots empowerment, political power remained concentrated amid patronage, corruption, and persistent conflict. Brazil’s coalition-building, by contrast, helped support more inclusive institutions and a government committed to public services, educational expansion, and a more level playing field. Lula’s story therefore functions as part of a larger argument about collective organization: political change became more durable when workers and diverse social groups gained a role in shaping institutions, rather than merely replacing one set of elites with another.